The Quickening eBook

But this time the Major had happened along, and when
Tike would not stop beating the horses for a shouted
cursing-out from the bank, the Major had spurred his
Hambletonian into the creek and knocked Tike winding.
More than that, he had made him lead his team out of
the ford and go back to the bridge crossing.

Being himself committed to the theory of turning the
other cheek, Thomas Jefferson could not question the
acute sinfulness of all this; yet it did not sufficiently
account for the Major as a Man of Sin. Had not
Peter, stirred, no doubt, by some such generous rage
as the Major’s, snatched out his sword and smitten
off a man’s ear?

In the other field, that of overlordship, the subtleties
were still more elusive. That the negroes, many
of whom were the sons and daughters of the Major’s
former slaves, should pass the old-time “Mawstuh”
on the pike with uncovered heads and respectful heel-scrapings,
was a matter of course. Thomas Jefferson was
white, free, and Southern born. But why his own
father and mother should betray something of the same
deference was not so readily apparent.

On rare occasions the Major, riding to or from the
cross-roads post-office in Hargis’s store, would
rein in his horse at the Gordon gate and ask for a
drink of water from the Gordon well. At such times
Thomas Jefferson remarked that his mother always hastened
to serve the Major with her own hands; this notwithstanding
her own and Uncle Silas’s oft-repeated asseveration
touching the Major’s unenviable preeminence as
a Man of Sin. Also, he remarked that the Major’s
manner at such moments was a thing to dazzle the eye,
like the reflection of the summer sun on the surface
of burnished metal. But beneath the polished exterior,
the groping perceptions of the boy would touch a thing
repellent; a thing to stir a slow current of resentment
in his blood.

It was Thomas Jefferson’s first collision with
the law of caste; a law Draconian in the Old South.
Before the war, when Deer Trace Manor had been a seigniory
with its six score black thralls, there had been no
visiting between the great house on the inner knoll
and the overgrown log homestead at the iron furnace.
Quarrel there was none, nor any shadow of enmity;
but the Dabneys were lords of the soil, and the Gordons
were craftsmen.

Even in war the distinction was maintained. The
Dabneys, father and son, were officers, having their
commissions at the enrolment; while Caleb Gordon,
whose name headed the list of the Paradise volunteers,
began and ended a private in the ranks.

In the years of heart-hardenings which followed, a
breach was opened, narrow at first, and never very
deep, but wide enough to serve. Caleb Gordon
had accepted defeat openly and honestly, and for this
the unreconstructed Major had never fully forgiven
him. It was an added proof that there was no
redeeming drop of the sang azure in the Gordon
veins—­and Major Caspar was as scrupulously
polite to Caleb Gordon’s wife as he would have
been, and was, to the helpmate of Tike Bryerson, mountaineer
and distiller of illicit whisky.